Increase police training budget

The following article represents the opinion of all the police chiefs on Cape Cod and Nantucket.

capecodtimes.com

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Posted Dec. 5, 2012 at 2:00 AM
Updated Dec 6, 2012 at 12:35 AM

Posted Dec. 5, 2012 at 2:00 AM
Updated Dec 6, 2012 at 12:35 AM

» Social News

The following article represents the opinion of all the police chiefs on Cape Cod and Nantucket.

The current fiscal climate facing our state, cities and towns is making it difficult for many municipal police departments to meet their training mandates.

The State's Municipal Police Training Committee (MPTC) is charged with the development and regulation of police training here in the commonwealth. For the second year in a row, the MPTC has informed police chiefs of its intention not to fund the mandated 32 hours of annual in-service training required per officer.

The funding for police training in Massachusetts is derived from two sources: 1) fees charged to municipalities for basic recruit training, which are placed into a retained revenue account and; 2) an annual appropriation by the state Legislature.

In the past, veteran officer training was offered at no cost to departments and officers and municipalities were charged a $2,500 fee for the training of municipal police recruits. The amount of the fee which can be charged to municipalities is set by the Legislature and currently covers the majority of the recruit's training expenses.

However, the actual cost to train a recruit officer is closer to $3,000 per student, and the MPTC budget must make up the difference for every recruit that is trained. Additionally, police departments carry the salary and associated benefit expenses of recruits along with uniform and equipment costs.

Finally, when recruits are attending the police academy, their absence from a department's daily shift schedule may require their replacement with other officers creating overtime expenditures.

A 2008 state-by-state comparison of police training funding indicates that Massachusetts pays substantially less in state funds than other states to train its municipal police officers. In 2008, Massachusetts had a budget of $2.91 million to train 15,568 police officers; this translates to $187 spent on training for each officer.

The accompanying chart compares the per capita allocation of state funding in a number of states (the total budget divided by the number of officers). Training allocation in this sampling ranges from $187 to $1,525. Massachusetts pays the lowest amount at $187. The state with the second-lowest per officer cost, Washington, is nearly twice that of Massachusetts at $368.

This year the state budget for training is approximately $2.6 million. So it is quite clear that the downward trend in state funding for police training has continued and is drastically affecting the ability of departments to meet the current and future demands for quality training and police professionalism that the public expects and deserves. In addition, it also increases the liability risk for each municipality.

In many cases, towns have to pay fees per officer, per subject and per instructor. In addition, as many police departments on Cape Cod are relatively small, sending an officer away for training means replacing that officer with another on overtime.

In addition to the annual training, budget constraints at the MPTC have dramatically reduced specialized training previously offered by the MPTC.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in the case of Canton, Ohio, vs. Harris (1989), clearly stated that police training be afforded to officers in order to "respond to usual and recurring situations with which they must deal." The justices went on to say that when officers are not properly trained, coupled with the agency's awareness of the training deficiencies, amounts to a "deliberate indifference." Liability can, and many times does, arise in these cases. In the year 2000, Darrell Ross of East Carolina University at Greenville, N.C., conducted a study of failure-to-train cases. Ross analyzed 1,525 cases and one of the conclusions indicated that plaintiffs prevailed in approximately one-third of the overall cases, and the average award is significant, amounting to over $450,000.

Although the issue of liability is a concern for police administrators, the primary reasons for adequate police training include raising the level of services delivered to the public, increasing the professionalism of the officers and the reduction of risk, both to the officers and the public.

Police chiefs throughout Cape Cod will be working with finance committees, boards of selectmen and the public to gain support for increasing training budgets in order to meet the standards required of modern police agencies.

Additionally, the Cape Cod Law Enforcement Council will be working on ways to train locally and regionally in an effort to decrease costs as well as to enhance the concept of mutual aid response to incidents. We ask for the public's support in these endeavors by contacting your local state representatives and share your concerns regarding the states continual underfunding for police training. It is only through this public support that we can begin to change this trend and bring our state in line with most others and move toward modern-day professional training for our officers and those they serve.